Win at All Costs: Inside Nike Running and Its Culture of Deception

"When I said that there are certain ways in which we are limitless, morally speaking, this is an instance of that. What this book is about is Nike and a culture of deception to support winning at all costs. And some of the costs were really high. Athletes were stepped on, their bodies subject to certain kinds of training that were not sustainable in the long term. And a lot of athletes have been broken and wounded in the process. “ Athletics is not neutral with respect to character” Matt Hart is a journalist and for the book he had access to communication between different higher ups in the company at Nike and interviews that give you a sense of that culture. At Nike and in high performance culture in general, if you prioritize winning above everything else, there are going to be trade-offs in terms of health, in terms of athlete safety, and so forth. So if you’re interested in the ways in which a focus on winning can go wrong, it’s an important read. I came to these ideas begrudgingly. I was running professionally at the time and people often asked me how my work in philosophy related to what I do athletically. I kept the spheres pretty separate: running was what I did at this time of day and then my philosophical work was later in the day. But I started seeing more of a crossover. I began realizing the ways in athletics is not neutral with respect to character. And if I was able to persevere, if I was patient, or if I were envious—these things were showing up in how I participated in the sport. So I started writing about it with greater regularity, just in terms of public philosophy, and became more interested in the ideas. That’s where the book came from. It’s supposed to be a bit provocative. When you hear that you think of all of the terrible people you know who are really good at sports! In running specifically, there are several virtues that both support peak performance and are compatible with a good life in general. They are some of the virtues that I named: perseverance, patience, even just emotional control—being able to down-regulate heightened emotions and respond peaceably to conflict. Those are things that really help as a runner, but also help you to live a more well-ordered life outside of sport. So there’s that. And I think, in the cases when there are vices that support performance—like envy, like pride, even intransigence when you hold on to something too long—oftentimes, there’s a virtue that could also support performance that you could substitute in its place. Instead of envy, emulation is a good substitute. Or instead of selfishness, having relationships of solidarity or love or charity. There are groups that have a lot of mutual edification and support built into their structure and we’re seeing a lot of peak performance from them. So I think that in many cases, you don’t need the vice in order to perform well. So that’s an argument I make in the book as well. Yes, the idea was that athletics or gymnastics and poetry serve together to prepare learners so that they would be teachable. It would help them to be more disciplined, to have more emotional control, to love the right things. Thereafter, you can be educated but you need to have that kind of foundation in place. Yes. And I don’t think that’s just sports. I’m an ethics professor and at the beginning of term, I always ask my students what ethics means. They just give a list of things they’re not supposed to do, and don’t provide any kind of vision of what you should do or be instead."